Wednesday, May 30, 2012

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Google Voice's New Update Lets Users Manage Anonymous Calls Top
google_voice_logo_medFor all its faults, Google Voice has gotten to be pretty solid with regard to how it routes calls from different groups of people, and today the search giant has gussied up the service even more. According to the official Google Voice blog, a new update now gives users more control over what to do with people who hide their phone numbers when they call. But let's back up a minute here.
 
Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs Movie Probably Won't Be "Cradle To Grave" Biography Top
aaron sorkinScreenwriter Aaron Sorkin offered some early thoughts today on the movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs, which he has signed on to write. Sorkin was speaking at the D10 conference, and it sounds like he hasn't actually written any of the screenplay yet — he said the initial stages of the process will look at lot more "like watching ESPN."
 
Mary Meeker: "We Are Still In Spring Training — Magnitude Of Upcoming Change Will Be Stunning" Top
re-imagining-computing-devicesMary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report is usually full of good stuff and this year is no exception. We already covered her comments about mobile monetization and the Facebook IPO, but one of the most interesting sections of her presentation were her thoughts about the future of the Internet. In her view, technology has already allowed us to re-imagine everything from book to news to note taking to crime awareness. Still, according to her, "we are still in spring training" and "the magnitude of upcoming change will be stunning."
 
InstaEDU On-Demand Video Tutoring Gets An A+ and $1.1M Seed From The Social+Capital Partnership Top
InstaEDU LogoIt's midnight before your final exam and you need help. Do you know where your tutor is? InstaEDU, says a $1.1 million seed round from former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya's fund The Social+Capital Partnership and several angels. Stumped high school and college students pay InstaEDU by the minute to video chat with tutors from top universities at any hour of the day. InstaEDU will use the seed to grow its team and build critical features like advanced scheduling. Co-founder Alison Johnston was the community manager of on-demand Q&A service Aardvark which was acquired by Google. With plenty of students and their parents happy to pay to get into a great school or job, now she's bringing the same satisfaction of instant answers to the lucrative tutoring space. In fact, 55% of student-tutor matches are made in under a minute and TechCrunch readers can get a free trial of InstaEDU at the end of this article...
 
Keen On… Big Data: Why UC Berkeley Might Have An Edge Over Stanford [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-29 at 4.20.11 PMBig data is not only hot in the startup world but also in the university. Stanford, with its intimate access to Silicon Valley is most readily associated with the study of big data. But UC Berkeley, the other great university in the Bay Area, is hot on Stanford's heels in terms of making sense of our new data driven economy. And later this week (May 31-June 1), Berkeley is hosting a conference about big data entitled Data Edge which promises to explore many of the most interesting questions about defining, understanding and extracting value from big data.
 
Microsoft Launches Office 365 For Government Top
office_365_logoGoogle scored an important win over Microsoft a few weeks ago when it won a $35 million U.S. government contract to bring its cloud-based office solution to the Department of the Interior. Microsoft's legacy solutions, of course, remain a staple in government offices, but as more and more agencies want to move their productivity and collaboration services to the cloud, Microsoft is running the risk of losing out in this lucrative market. Today, however, the company is launching a new service that should give more of its government customers, which tend to have very strict data security and privacy regulations, the option to move to the cloud. Microsoft's new Office 365 for Government is, in the company's own words, "a new multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud."
 
If The Spec Is Dead, So Is The Nexus Tablet Top
Nexus-6-ReplicantsIt seems the much-rumored Google Nexus Tablet is nearing release. Citing Basemark benchmarking reports, the device is supposedly codenamed Grouper, running Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and employing a 7-inch, 1280 x 768 display powered by a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3. If true, this means the upcoming tablet will likely lack 4G wireless connectivity since Nvidia's latest SoC is incompatible with current 4G chipsets. Without 4G, and since this is a forward-thinking Nexus device, it's safe to say that the tablet will lack a data wireless radio of any sort and will instead ship with just WiFi. Besides, even without the compatibility issues (which might be resolved), Google will not be able to launch a wireless-enabled tablet at a Kindle Fire price. They can't in essence eat their Jelly Bean and have it too.
 
True&Co Takes $2M Seed Funding From First Round, SoftTech, Others To Shake Up The Bra Industry Top
True&Co logoThe women's liberation movement once taught ladies to cast off their bras in solidarity and empowerment; now a new startup, founded by two women, is inverting that formula to make sure that when you put it back on, that bra fits like a glove. True&Co is launching an online bra fitting service and shop that takes a very traditional (and tedious) process -- finding bras you like that actually fit well -- and makes it quick and kind of fun, and it is doing it with $2 million in seed funding from a great list of investors: First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, Aileen Lee, Softbank Capital and former LinkedIn executive Ellen Levy. (Lee's investment comes from her new, yet-to-be-named seed fund, True says.)
 
ShareMyPlaylists Relaunches Spotify App Based On Hand-Curated Playlists Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-30 at 18.20.39ShareMyPlaylists was the first site to allow the sharing of Spotify playlists (launched 2009). It's now relaunched its music discovery Spotify app based its 91,000 hand-curated playlists. The site competes with the record label Spotify apps like Digster (from Universal Music) and Filtr (Sony Music) but its advantage is that it allows music from all labels and allows user generated content - something the labels get nervous about.
 
Wrike Releases A Free Version Of Its Project Management App Top
wrike logoWrike is hoping to expand its audience today with the launch of a free version of its project management tool. Wrike says it already has 2,000 customers including Accenture, Stanford, and Ticketmaster, but until now, the cheapest pricing level was $49 per month. Even though releasing a free version is an obvious way to get more people to try the product, CEO Andrew Filev says he approached the "freemium" model cautiously, to ensure that Wrike didn't end up "cannibalizing" any of its sales.
 
Mark Pincus On Zynga's Facebook Addiction: "We've Never Thought Of It In Terms Of Attachment (Or Detachment)" Top
photoMark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after its IPO two weeks ago, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga's "attachment to Facebook." "Zynga is very tied to Facebook," Kara Swisher brought up immediately, describing the two stocks as "tethered together." Indeed, Zynga makes up 15% of Facebook's revenue, and Facebook makes up most of Zynga's.
 
Grubwithus Served $5M By GRP, Michel Daher To Take Its Social Dining Global Top
Screen shot 2012-05-30 at 7.16.16 AMGrubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region. The startup's series A round follows the $1.6 million in seed funding it raised this time last year from a slew of prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Yuri Milner, Matt Cutts, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, and Start Fund -- to name a few. As a result of the new round, GRP Partner Mark Suster will be joining the startup's board of directors.
 
Mary Meeker: "Mobile Monetization Has More Going For It Than Early Desktop Monetization Had" Top
mary_meeker_kpcbWe've heard a lot about how monetizing mobile content is difficult in the context of Facebook's IPO. A lot of the company's growth is coming from mobile, after all, but it's currently very hard to make money of this mobile traffic. At AllThingsD's D10 conference today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker released her annual overview of Internet trends and she, too, highlighted this mobile monetization problem.
 
Pinterest Rival Fancy Brings Social Commerce To iPhone & iPad, Announces 1 Million Users Top
fancy-iosPinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 worth of commerce through its service each week. To help further grow its shopping platform, which initially debuted in February of this year, the company has also updated its iOS application. The app doesn't just support browsing and liking images (you "fancy" things, actually) as before, but adds the ability to purchase items directly from the app itself.
 
Mary Meeker Weighs In On The Facebook IPO: Bankers "Did The Best They Could" Top
mary_meeker.03The fallout from Facebook's initial public offering earlier this month continues to play out in the media, but according to some of the most senior players in the financial space, any negative aspects of the social network's stock market debut may not have really been the fault of the company or even the bankers who managed it. The latest big name to offer this opinion is Mary Meeker. In an on-stage conversation at the D10 Conference in Southern California where she presented her latest report on the state of the Internet, the current Kleiner Perkins partner and longtime Wall Street analyst was asked what she would have done differently about the Facebook IPO had she been involved...
 
Atlassian Launches A Marketplace For Project Management Add-Ons Top
atlassian marketplaceAtlassian, the Australian company that makes popular software project management tools JIRA and Confluence, has opened a marketplace where customers can download and buy add-ons for the company's apps. Usually, the launch of a marketplace or app store signals a company's broader platform ambitions, but Atlassian President Jay Simons says the platform approach has been "part of our DNA" for a long time. The company regards JIRA and Confluence, in particular, as its core products, so it has been building its own add-ons, and companies like Box and Zendesk have offered their own integrations. (Marketplace includes add-ons for a few other Atlassian products, too.)
 
Group-Payments Startup Payumi Poised To Launch After Seed Round Top
173308v2-max-250x250The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups have tried to tackle. ShareAGift in the UK focuses on joint gift purchases, but is more an affiliate gift sales model. In the US there is WePay and PayDivvy, both of which err on the side of being deposit account providers. WePay has moved to being a B2B play, trying to woo small merchants away from PayPal. In France there is Leetchi and FriendFund in Berlin. Many have substantial backing from VCs. Now, Payumi in the UK is poised to come out of public beta and hopes to cover all the 'group payment' bases and has sealed a £150,000 ($186,000) round of seed funding taking its total seed funding to £250,000.
 
Not Just For Native Mobile Apps Anymore: Parse Launches JavaScript SDK Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-30 at 11.14.27 AMParse, the Y Combinator-backed startup that powers the back-end for mobile apps like Band of the Day and Hipmunk, is rolling out support for mobile web apps too. The San Francisco startup has a new SDK for JavaScript that makes it easier to build HTML5 apps. Parse has long billed itself as the "Heroku for Mobile," a service that takes over the hassle of building a scalable back-end for applications. The new Javascript SDK comes with security controls, flexible data storage, advanced data queries, user authentication and geolocation. It's built on top of the Backbone.js JavaScript framework from DocumentCloud. Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam said about 38 percent of the company's developers had requested HTML5 support. Their current split between iOS and Android is about 65-to-35, but many use both.
 
TubeMogul Pitches Brand Safety With PageSafe, A Tool To See Where Ads Really Appear Top
tubemogul logoMedia agencies want to ensure that their ads are only seen in the best light... But a lot of times, the networks they use to distribute those ads don't do a good job of distinguishing between good content or bad content, or where an ad appears. That's why video ad startup TubeMogul has opened up a new page that will let anyone -- whether it be a brand, an agency, a publisher, or merely a curious observer -- scan a URL and see how it ranks in terms of brand safety. That page, based on TubeMogul's PageSafe technology, is a powerful tool to show off what viewers really see and what brand associations they're getting when ads run against certain content.
 
SlickFlick App Lets You Tell Stories With Your Photos, Signs Getty Deal Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-30 at 16.51.03It's been fascinating to watch the proliferation of photo apps before and since the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook. EyeEm has a beautiful app which makes tagging images to locations ridiculously simple (plus all that filter goodness). LoopCam makes hilarious photo loops you want to share with your friends. Now SlickFlick has appeared with an iOS app to help you create fun stories around your pictures. [download from iTunes here] The boot-strapped startup was founded by Maria Constantinescu who has been relentless in pushing her vision for the last two years and today she lands a big-brother partner in the shape of the Getty image library.
 

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1 comment:

  1. Good day,

    My name is Brandon and I work as a Community Outreach Associate at Chegg. You may not be aware of it, but Chegg acquired InstaEdu a little over a year ago. With the acquisition, we rebranded InstaEDU to Chegg Tutors – changing the name and URL in the process.

    I noticed that you have a post that links to InstaEdu. Would you be able to change it from InstaEDU to Chegg Tutors https://www.chegg.com/tutors/)? We are currently redirecting InstaEdu to Chegg, but it might be a bit confusing for your readers to land on a different site than they expected.

    We found links to InstaEdu on the following page(s):
    insanelygood.blogspot.com/2012/05/y-alert-techcrunch_30.html

    For your convenience, I’ve put an example of the replacement code for you to use (or something similar):
    InstaEDU (Now Chegg Tutors)

    Please let me know if you have any questions about Chegg.

    Best,
    Brandon Harvey
    Community Outreach | Chegg

    ReplyDelete